Kaizen and Juice 2.0
By Chris Gemignani
April 30, 2007
Find more about:
design
juice
python
Kaizen may be the the art of continuous improvement, but today we’re happy to showcase the art of discontinuous improvement. In one big bang, we’re introducing a new logo, a new website, and a new platform to deliver web services and tools to make your life better.
The new logo is the product of months of pixel pushing and brainstorming. I’ll detail the evolution of the logo in a future post, but for the moment I’ll leave you with a comparison of the old and new logos.
| old Juice logo |  |
| new Juice logo |  |
The website redesign is an effort to improve the “discoverability” of our site. Good articles were mouldering in the archives. It was hard to find old or popular articles. Search was barely existent. A follow up article will trace the evolution of the site design.
We built the new site using Python and Django. This is a dynamic platform that gives us a lot of power to add new features, tools, and applications. We’re excited about what we will be able to bring you—we have a whiteboard full of ideas just awaiting implementation.
The new site, while better, isn’t perfect. Despite our efforts, there may be links that don’t work or screencasts that neither screen nor cast. We'd love to hear your reaction to the new design. Please leave a comment to tell us what you think or if you find anything that's broken. We'll fix it right away. With your help, we’ll make this site and this community better in a process of continuous improvement—Kaizen.
We've gotten a lot of positive comments about the design. I wanted to thank rockbeatspaper, the web design consultants who worked with us to create this site. A great company and a terrific job.
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30 comments | Show all comments only the last 5 are shown
Kristine said:
Congrats on the new launch. I've uncovered a few issues as I navigated around the site...
- unable to download Zach's B-eye presentation. Sent to Juice's error page.
- green links to other posts at the bottom of several articles are not working for me. Again, I'm sent to the error page.
Thanks for all the good info!
Chris Gemignani said:
Kristine,
Thanks! The green links issue is fixed. We'll fix the presentation link.
Bill said:
- The logo link doesn't link back to the main site.
- All links from the feed show up page not found.
- Link to Excel Chart Cleaner shows up page not found.
- Looks a little web 2.0 for an analytics group.
Patrick Ibison said:
-OMG! Is web 2.0 already passe? I am so far behind... you'd think an analytics group would have told me.
Mario said:
I don't want to spoil the party, but isn't the logo very similar to Amazon's (the arrow below the name)?
Great website by the way.
Michael said:
The new site looks great. All the cool blogs are going with the 3 column look.
I noticed that the Excel chart cleaner link is not working. boo hoo for me, now I will have to reformat all my charts by hand.
Jon said:
Hi,
I really like the filters on the right - really makes it easier to find relevant articles.
One problem I've spotted... the Excel lightbox download (from http://www1.juiceanalytics.com/writing/2006/11/lightboxing-images-in-excel/) doesn't appear to be working.
Cheers,
Jon
Kyle said:
Hey guys
I like the new design, much more accessible - except for the blue, which grates a bit. Also, on your people pages there looks to be an open link tag - a bunch of stuff under 'Contact $x' is a link to 'mailto'.
Cheers
Kyle
Chris Gemignani said:
3. I think the links in the feed will clear up
5. Mario, we went back and forth 100 times over whether the logo looks too Amazon! You're not the first to note the similarity. We'll talk about this more in the logo post.
All: The download links should be fixed.
Thanks!
derek said:
Nice! I have just a couple of points:
After reading these comments I hunted around the top for "Juice home page" or similar. I eventually found "Back t writing" at the bottom, which I don't think is as intuitive. I always ask bloggers to include a word or graphic link to their home page www.whatever.com, at the top left or top centre, in any other page. You may feel differently.
Have you considered keeping the front page fresh with "Most recent comments", listing author and topic at the top right? Kaiser Fung's Junk Charts does this very successfully, I think, helping to keep the conversation going and avoiding what Edward Tufte calls "recency bias" in discussions of older articles.
Chris Gemignani said:
Thanks Derek. You can also click on the "Juice" logo to go back to the home page.
When we asked readers what they wanted to see in the site, one of the most requested features was better access to comments. One option is a "most recent comments" streamer on the home page. I'm personally dissatisfied with this because I don't think there's enough of a way to show the context of the comment. Nonetheless, we may do this once the dust settles.
Another idea I like is to let someone subscribe to an email stream of comments on a particular post--most useful if you've posted and want to see the followup conversation without checking back.
Christian Westarp said:
The link to the screen cast for doubling up excel charts no longer works.
ken said:
Nice update... two navigational issues:
1. When you click on, say, Excel in the "By Topic" section, you get the first article only -- but there are 44 articles available. Is it possible to see all of them? Same goes for Monthly archives: I can see the post and the most recent 6 (in the box at the bottom) -- but what if there are 14 posts that month?
2. In the previous By Topic example, it takes you to the first post from that topic. Then you need to click on the "read comments" before you get the navigation back and forth to other articles (note: can't do much about it, but in this case, it is listed by date, not by topic). However, the middle option "Back to Writing" takes you to the home page. This seems a bit jarring as you'd expect it to take you to the original post, without comments.
Also:
1. It seems like the "Elsewhere" links show up on the home page, but not on other pages (just shows the feed).
2. Blog comments websites don't appear to be showing up.
Josh said:
Wow...what a shock today! Very well done fellas. And look at the little sparkline-like graphs over on the right to show who has the most postings, most postings in a topic, by date, etc. Talk about practicing what you preach. VERY nice touch! Keep up the good work.
Coe said:
I just found you guys, so can't compare to a previous design, but I like what I see. A few comments:
1. If the browser window is small, the "Juice" logo overlaps the "Solutions" item on the navigation menu. My window is not even that small, but it's not full-screen.
2. It is not very clear that when you are on a writing topic page, the right-hand topic list now shows the number of articles that have the specified topic *and* the topic that the page applies to. It took me a while to realize why I was seeing 44 Excel articles on the main writing page and only 10 when I happened to be looking at the analytics topic page.
3. Continuing from that thought, when I clicked on "Excel" from the analitics topic page, I expected it to show me that there were 10 articles - the intersection of "Analytics" and "Excel" rather than 44.
4. Echoing another post, when I click on a topic, I would like to see a list of all articles with that topic. I am really enjoying browsing the articles on this site, and would like to see more.
5. In the more-on-excel-in-cell-graphing article, the link "http://www.juiceanalytics.com/downloads/Excel%20in-cell%20graphing%20ideas.xls" appears to be broken (along with another .xls link that I saw somewhere but I forget where).
I wouldn't normally bother with a post like this, but this is such a high-quality site, I appreciate the opportunity to help make it even better.
Jeff said:
http://www.decilogratis.com/img/200612/1116_amazon-logo.jpg
Looks familiar :)
Great job guys, love it
Mary said:
Nice, but I miss the color orange. Don't you think something should be orange?
Chris Gemignani said:
A few notes on fixes:
- Blog commenter's names are now linked to their websites if they give one.
- Several download links have been fixed
- Screencasts are still broken
- Navigation (Previous article, back to writing, next article) has been partly fixed
Thanks to all. More fixes are coming.
peter said:
there is nothing juicy about the blue colour under the letters. the blue line does not show that u are "peeling" data to its utmost usefulness(unlike the orange). that street corner picture u had, i identified with it (people with one passion, solve client problem, pushing applications to the extreme), but great site, amazing content, well structured except the blue line. Inspiration to the world of data analytics initiates.....
Miguel Marcos said:
Hi. A link from the RSS file, "Top 10 Problems with Excel", is not working. It comes up with the following URL:
http://www1.juiceanalytics.com/writing/2007/04// and the text on the page is as follows:
"Page not found
The JuiceBox can't find the page you asked for. Maybe try a search."
Chris Gemignani said:
Peter, I miss the picture too. We used to have a rotating picture in the header--all things that evoked some aspect of analytics for us, and I miss that even more.
However, there was just no way to reconcile the pictures with this sleeker site design. They have reappeared on our business cards, but that's a story for another day.
We went back and forth about the orange in the logo. We heard far to many comments that the new logo mirrored Amazon and orange just made the parallel too stark. I don't buy the Amazon argument, but I'll make that argument another day too.
Thanks!
Chris Gemignani said:
Site fix update:
- All the broken links to images and downloads should be fixed.
- A bug in the comment system was fixed which caused all comments to attach to the most recent post.
- Links to screencasts are still broken
Thanks, everyone.
GrahamC said:
Nice to see you are experimenting, sadly doesn't work for me.
Your new logo makes it appear that you are now an Amazon subsidiuary.
I did have problems trying to search through the archives in the past, so any work to improve that is great.
But.
The new web layout is 66% cruft - 3 columns, only one of which i'm normally interested in (the article). Additionally it looks like you've dumped those giant boxes at the bottom of the page , just because you could.
Sorry, far preferred the old layout (especially with the nice random header images)
GrahamC said:
EEEK, even worse - i've been reading this through Netvibes and I went to the main page just to double check my views and uh, as a reader, I can't find a single button which takes me to yesterdays (this) article.
I've only now worked out that it's in one of the big boxes as 'recent'.
For being all about presenting information in the useable manner i think you need to drink your own kool-aid.
P.s. Still love the content though :o)
Chris Gemignani said:
GrahamC: I agree that getting to previous articles, especially in filtered views is a major usability problem. We'll fix it; give us time.
Chris Gemignani said:
There were a few changes to the blog today that should make frequent readers happy.
- The writing page now shows recent posts and comments.
- A few Internet Explorer CSS problems have been cleaned up as well.
Jonah said:
A few big complaints:
1) Bookmarked pages no longer work (permalinks changed, no redirects).
2) Can't browse through archives start to finish. There are 21 posts from Jan 2005. I can see one at a time. And can't see more than a few titles ahead.
3) No dates on posts in archives, so it's tricky to know if links are in fact, the archives I'm looking for.
After 20 minutes of looking for a bookmark on animated scatterplots, I stumbled across it: http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/2005/6/
Sadly, under the new design, the animation isn't there. Instead I get code: [FLASH] http://www.juiceanalytics.com/flash/tigerwoodsfinal , 440, 430 [/FLASH]
Juice is usually right on the money with presentation. But you have deviated from standards. Blog standards: date based archiving, categorical archiving, (scrolling across all stories in a given archive, abbreviated or full text), and individual archiving.
You've replaced standards with some filing system that pushes the most popular archives into view at the expense of all others.
David Parker said:
I've tried to get used to the new look - I have.
The functional layout is fine. However, I miss the hip looking photo banner. And the bold green titles look too squeezed together, heavily aliased and generally cheap and ugly.
Jon Peltier said:
I wondered what happened to this blog. The RSS feeds just stopped, but I never got around to visiting the site itself. Finally I found it today from Chris' post in another blog, and discovered that I'd missed several months of discussion. You should have sent out an announcement using the old RSS feed.
My first impressions of the new layout are positive, by the way.
kcmarshall said:
I spotted a bug and thought I'd report it.
The post-specific topic links don't work properly. For example, on this post the topics are "Design, Juice, Python".
The Python link is:
http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/?/writing/topics/python/
but should be:
http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/topics/python/
Regards!
Kevin
said:
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